If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Compared to my unlimited - web , bandwidth web host service, site5 is bloody expensive as cheap reliable professional hosting goes. The charges work out to abour Double what I pay and I pay £30 all in, including domain name.

1and1 like all the bigger hosting companies seem to offer you a good deal but even these prices quoted are expensive and given that 1and1 have cap limits, what do they charge for going over your cap limit?

I would shop around more because IMHO you will find a cheaper web host than these offerings. Cheap does not mean that your not getting service or support. It is a popular misconception that you have to pay to get service. Utter rubbish. Some shell companies offer same or better services from bulk host services which these companies like 1and1 are very likely to use and cream off a hell of a profit.

====================

Horror stories.... Yes, StreamLine.net (part of Dollamore Ltd) who are a really big Hosting company based in Derby, Derbyshire. They are without a doubt a bunch of robbing b@*****s charged me £79 for a two year contract. 3 months in to the deal the site gets wiped out from a serverside attack.

I found from what logs remained that the attack came from an american IP address block and the web host was offering at the time a free 3 months deal as a trial and it was in that period that the site got trashed.

The version of PHP that they told me that they were running was a very bug ridden release and they stated that they had no intention of upgrading to PHP5 despite pointing out to them that in the period when the site was hacked, I had no ISP as my broadband had been cut off by my ISP who was demanding money that they were not entitled to.

When I eventually got online again, I found that the issues did not stop. Logging in to the FTP side of the service, found that the htdocs folder had been deleted completely and I had not got enough root permissions to make the directory. Despite stating this clearly to the morons, they told me to make a folder and that the problem was not theirs to deal with and the techs tried to blame me for the problem by claiming that I deleted the folder. Considering I never had permissions to make an effing folder, what these cretins failed to see was that I would not have the permissions to delete it.

The person who hacked the server gained root permissions. So this would have been the exploit in PHP4 that was taken advantage of in order to gain root permissions.

I reported them to trading standards authority and they were a complete waste of time, the advice was to write, telling them my right and to ask for a partial refund. The letter got nowhere, I got ignored and Trading standards refused to take any further action because the company had not replied and were using a loop hole to keep hold of the money.

So in simple terms, if your in the UK and looking for a UK web host, give Streamline or any of Dollamores services a wide one. You will be doing yourself a favor.

Oh... did I mention that they tried to take another 2 year payment when renewal was on the horizon? This was despite me informing them 3 months before hand in a recorded delivery letter that we will not be renewing... Bunch of cowboys.

My current host... well were now in to year 2, so that is an indication if any that they are very accommodating and have answered my email requests within minutes, sometimes the reply is instant and they are all personal answers, not computer generated and the person uses their real name, so theirs a data trail.

As for who they are... , if you want to buy some reliable UK based hosting space, talk to me.

As for StreamLine.net, unless they refund me the full £79, I will take every opportunity to minimize their revenues and potential new customers.

Startlogic has seemed to do well for myself, I am currently running a local online newspaper and have found their affiliate program to be a big plus as well. Startlogic offers $100.00 payment for each refferal that buys hosting, they also offer unlimited bandwidth

I was a customer of startlogic for about a month. The only positive thing I can say about them is that they did refund my money, prorated of course. My site was down as much as it was up, anything over 30 users on line and it was gone. If you plan on calling into customer support, eat a large meal first, or you may starve to death before they answer. Stay away.

Can't say enough good things about ICDsoft.com - especially they're unbelievable 24/7/365 support (most questions are literally answered within 10 minutes). Some of the support staff (not all) will even offer you help to debug custom (built by you) server-side scripts. Check them out, they're a fantastic service with >99.9&#37; uptime across all their servers and very reasonably priced in my opinion.

I've switched careers...
I'm NO LONGER a scientist,
but now a web developer...
awesome.

I started a shared hosting plan with Micfo for thepointless.com several years back because they had a 1-year-free deal. In the past year or two, I decided to spring for a VPS on which to host svidgen.com, midbit.com, and other misc. personal projects.

Having been on a shared host with Micfo for several years, and having experienced better performance out of that server and better service and uptime than any of my previous hosting providers, I decided to try their VPS. I got a decent deal: about $34/month for a 10GB HD and ... 256MB RAM (I think)--and their deals have gotten better since I signed up. So far, I've experience great uptime and performance on the VPS. The support team was also quick to respond to my request for the name of and installing of the CentOS package manager (which is apparently yum (which I really kind of like)).

Like all of my previous hosting providers, there is some unavoidable downtime (occasional network issues) and incidents with bad reps. But, overall, they've far surpassed the expectations my previous hosting providers have set ...

Uptime on my VPS: 223 days.

It seems as though I can no longer SSH into the shared box--probably some ruffians broke that privilege. Back when I could, I think I was seeing an average of around 3 or 4 months between reboots--most of which I didn't notice until finding a low uptime number ...

I use several different "reseller hosting" packages... 1 per company, 1 company per country (actual physical location of the server). I do this so I can offer a backup server to my bigger accounts and so that I don't have to worry about server space or in some cases stupid regulations (i.e. distribution of strong cryptographic materials or services from US and other Wassnaar Agreement countries... these servers are in other countries). I do have enough clients to be able to do this without eating into the profit so it works out OK. You can find 30GB reseller packages around the globe starting at around $US90/year. You can host a lot of sites in 30GB. The only BIG disappointments I've had have been with HostGator and The Planet in the US, Banana Hosting in th UK and Absolight in France but these were a few years ago and they might be just fine now. At the moment I use servers in the US, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Russia and India. They are either 30GB or 50GB with cPanel and WHM at a total cost of about $US800 per year... the cost of 6 medium size clients. To me it's worth it to have redundancy and flexibility.

As far as all the 99.9&#37; UPTIME that almost everybody declares... there's no such animal, just do the math. And read the user agreements/contacts... nobody will honor the uptime claims with important things like paying for losses incurred by the downtime or giving you a refund. So don't expect that from anybody! Servers do go down and sometimes there might be connectivity problems to a server even though the server is functioning properly... have some sort of redundancy if your sites are important!

After trying several I'm currently with rimuhosting.com. The think I really liked with them was that I got a virtual linux where I have full control over what i install of SW on it. Currently I run Apache, Tomcat and MySQL on the server. No conflicts with other sites.

Startlogic has seemed to do well for myself, I am currently running a local online newspaper and have found their affiliate program to be a big plus as well. Startlogic offers $100.00 payment for each refferal that buys hosting, they also offer unlimited bandwidth

Got a couple of clients behind SL. VDeck usually fails on me (50%) specially with their file manager (beta). My clients' sites usually go down. I don't even care now as to why as their cs don't know s**t. <<< Is that allowed? Logs didn't do any good as well. Got a couple of clients on stablehost, 1and1, bluehost, godaddy, softsyshosting, discountasp, and many more and so far what they got in common is you have to know what you're doing. If things came up and you have to contact their cs and when you feel that the person on the line is obviously guessing hangup and try again. (Well this apply to any cs call anyway).

GoDaddy seems to be the most popular, and the most advertised. They don't seem to have the best service or price, though, and I hear many people complain about the complexity of their system. I think it's ideal for many developers.

I have to say HostGator is my personal favorite, just because of how responsive they are and how great their hosting services are. They provide unlimited e-mails and subdomains, plus a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth. Plus they're really, really cheap for how much you get for their hosting packages.